Camus on Sisyphus posted by Richard Seymour

Like Said and Derrida, Camus emerged from the periphery of a rapacious empire as a subversive, and critical intellectual (although not, in the end, too critical - rejecting Stalinism for pacifism, he could not wholeheartedly support the Algerian revolt or the demand for independence). Like both, he criticised Marxism, (although not on account of its Eurocentrism, Orientalism or phallogocentrism). Unlike either, Camus could avoid repetitiveness and opaqueness (respectively). Here is on The Myth of Sisyphus:

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

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It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods w as necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

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As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screw ed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

Camus speaks of Sisyphus as "the absurd hero", whose happiness is to be found in the meaninglessness of his existence, in his own negation, in his subjection to symbolic repetition which the big Other (Mercury) has imposed on him. It is the price of his passions, and his love of life. Through it, however, he finds his enjoyment of life.

Well, that's just a tad too masochistic for me. I prefer to think of Sisyphus as the trapped office pen-pusher, or call centre worker, or car factory labourer. Each new project, each new research job or sales drive, each new batch of cars becomes an enormous rock to be pushed up the hill. Thus completed, a new contract is procured and the stone trundles back to the bottom again. It is the curse of alienated labour in which one's own desire is always being deferred or pursued on the side, while one is submitted to the circuit of capital. It is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

Contra Camus, I think Prometheus will in the end be a happier human type than Sisyphus.